from Elemental Portraits: Nocturnes for Two Pianos
composed by Kirk WhippleKosal Long: 1975 to June 7, 1989

1. The end of a classic American dream
confronts the runner coming over the rise
of blond hills & dark trees mirroring the lake.
The drowned laughter of classmates
horsing around on a summer outing
Their blind eyes, and the sun cresting each ripple,
the silent "O" of empty inner tubes,
punctuated the end of the sentence.
At the bottom of the lake a fishermans net
casts a game of cats cradle for things lost
and the sleek young diver
The boy who, with his 14-year-old eyes
sought the true identity of light
on this side of the world:
the names Refugee &
Cambodia
whispering homeward
in his ears.

2. The runners legs measure
each step, each breath, bearing witness
as if life depended on it: systole, diastole.
The indifferent ground answers, Decrescendo.

No overtones to clear the ears palette.
The boy left the killing fields for El Verano.We survived the war, saw death and hunger every day.
Now, the youngest and sweetest taken from us.
I dream of walking that lake bed clad in citrine light.
A constellation of bubbles escapes, takes flight.
A velvet foot upon the blue throat of the California sky,
the lotus flowering in the mind,
a journey taking us home.
Home, could he whisper it
The long slender vowels of the soul,
no distant jungles to flee from
Refugee camp, the bodycount and the hunger
of foreign syllables.

The harmony shifted
in the final depths: an empty raft in deep summer.

2/1994

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